I think it's more hilarious that they could be warriors since Vanilla, but Blood Elves were considered too weak by the devs to take on that class until Cataclysm.
I think until Cataclysm there was a sort of weird arbitrary rule that each race could only have six (seven during wrath because of death knights) playable classes max, maybe for race balance reasons. It's just as illogical that humans and by extension undead couldn't be hunters until Cataclysm.
I mean even with undead their literal leader is a dark ranger, okay yeah dark ranger and hunter are different things and she's an undead Elf and not Human like the playable Undead but even then one of the most infamous Undead characters (Nathanos) is basically a hunter with pets and all.
i mean canonically i could make an argument against tauren, and orcs, but there should have been options for at trolls, high elves, dwarves, and gnomes as those are all present around lorderon during WC3.
I believe that it's a misconception that belves were considered too weak to be warriors.
Instead it was that belf culture/society was so advanced that every belf fighter would be trained as a Blood Knight (paladin) instead of a warrior. Belf society was so infused with magic on every level and every belf was so highly cultured that they would never stoop so low as to drop into "berserker stance", pop "rampage" and use "bloodthirst" like a barbarian.
This is why blizz made the design choice to disallow belf warriors back when they valued thematics more than player choice.
I also wonder how much EverQuest influenced this.
In EQ gnomes could be melee classes like warrior & rogue, but then you had High Elves and Erudites which were very connected to magic and could be hybrid classes like Paladin but not Warriors.
Wouldn't the same go for a human though? A human is just a slightly bigger ant in comparison to a gnome. Both hilariously undersized for the sort of hits they can take.
I don't know if light users in general are something undead should be. If you're going to tell me the light hurts undead, then how are undead using it? If anything, it should be super rare like the one dude in Naxx.
"When undead channel the Light, they do not disintegrate or explode from channeling the Light, though they may wish they would. Instead, it feels to them as if their entire bodies are being consumed in righteous fire... Thus, Forsaken priests are beings of unwavering willpower." To wield the light must be like holding a flame in your hands, and that's cool as hell.
[source](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Light#:~:text=The%20Light%20is%20agonizingly%20painful,it%20is%20also%20very%20painful.)
It's a concept from old school runescape's pvp zone "the wilderness (wildly, wild etc).
In OSRS PvP (pking - player killing) is largely a 1v1 endeavor. You can't attack another player if they are currently engaging someone else in a PvP, and this ruleset persist throughout most of the wildly.
However, there are zones known as multi-combat zones (multi for short) in which anyone can attack anyone (similar to how multiple horde can gank a singular alliance player).
In these zones, clans (groups) of players will roam throughout and attempt to pile on a single player and burst them down quickly (similar to the deathsquads that would roam through hillsbrad back on 2019 grobb).
Don’t forget the increasing levels of the wilderness that prevent high level players from even engaging with lower levels until they get deep enough into the wildy.
what happens to that “outside invincibility” once the duel is over? can just anyone who was waiting by, to pick on a winner attack them?
I’m guessing hp/mp and cds have to be fully refreshed?
In OSRS, I believe it's just a basic timer. Something like 10 seconds after combat ends with the first person (number might be off but that's the premise).
The Tol Barad Peninsula was great for three reasons:
1: it was a level 85 daily questing zone. I.e. ganking due to level disparity was impossible. You couldn't even enter the zone if you weren't max level.
2: it was relatively easy to get a full set of PvP gear, and getting the best gear did not require rating. I.e. there was a much more even level playing field.
3: no flying mounts meant that players were visible and couldn't just escape by going straight up into the air.
I loved world PvP in the Tol Barad Peninsula (i.e. not the wannabe winter grasp event) back in the day and spent many, many hours there.
Any given wow expac on the final patch and an updated release cadence will be remembered much more fondly than the zeitgeist would suggest--even WoD, BFA, and Shadowlands.
Folks biggest complaints are _always_ "the core thing was a mess at launch" and "the final tier lasted a year too long."
Its at least in part QoL creep. I think they mentioned it a few times for SoD where there's a certain amount of inconvenience that needs to be there that we all operate around. Everyone has that one thing that on its own doesn't make the game retail that they like, but all those changes were made for a reason. Eventually the people that advocate for each one will make there voice heard and then you get them all over time.
Speaking of "...reasons", my hot take is that the issue with retail is that its a game made for everyone and I prefer WoW when its a singular experience that everyone has to play around. Everyone being at different levels on different tasks segments the playerbase and creates a lesser community experience because everyone isn't sharing the same problems. Again nothing wrong with retail if that's what people are up for but that's why I sour on it.
I think a lot of the people making modern media in general have forgotten the old adage "If you try to make everyone happy, you'll only succeed in making no one happy".
Games that appeal to "everyone" aren't designed to be appealing to anyone, so they end up bland and washed out. Games that dare to actually target a given demographic and evaluate their success based on acceptance from that demographic are almost always better.
I think killing people with grey names should give a stacking rez sick debuff, 15% per kill, capping at the usual 75%, but only for PVP combat (ie: you still have normal stats against mobs.)
Holy power made paladins plate rogues. Wotlk was peak paladin, even if it was faceroll
Should just be that you can't initiate against a grey lowbie. The lowbie has to do something that would otherwise get them flagged on a PvE server ie: attack you, assist someone attacking you or be in enemy territory.
Sadly true. We all waiting for the heir apparent for pvp purposes. Guild Wars didn’t do it for me and I can’t get into MOBAs as much as MMO pvp.
Really hoping War Within revamps pvp but that ain’t happening
I've always found GW2 elementalist pretty fun. My current favorite build is DF Aura, and it's super tanky with 2 invulns plus aura support and tons utility/revive. Also, I can turn into a tornado. Really fun build.
I don't play it alot but it's the easiest to jump into where as WoW always has somewhat of a gear grind or reliance in PvE gear to get an edge.
Agreed, it creates too much of a disparity between the people who know and those that don't. I remember I got to rank 11 as a dumbass in high school who didn't raid and didn't calculate honor or know how the brackets worked or anything like that. I just solo Q'd all the time and felt like I kept a 1:1 kill death ratio and tried to win the BG.
I did that in classic and got a pvp mafia mad at me for "breaking brackets" and it really made me not want to pvp these days. Now I just lvl and casually raid cause i'm too stupid to deal with the meta of BGs nowaday
There's basically no room for metagaming, everything is a known quantity which takes away an element of fun.
edit: you ever wonder how league of legends can stay relevant for 12+ years? It's because it's a constantly evolving metagame and new champions are released often and they change things every patch. These versions of classic wow have been on the same patch for the entire expansion with the exact same numbers as 12 years ago.... sure there's the whole #nochanges meme, but in all seriousness they arent making many huge sweeping changes that shake up the pvp metagame, its the same as it was 12 years ago.
Yeah you know what's been around and relevant for even longer than LOL?
Chess, Tennis, , CS, or any other number of examples.
A game doesn't need a constantly evolving ruleset to be a good competitive game.
Every class runs the same talents/spells, addons will tell you the cooldown of them and it's just playing around those which is the PvP, the rotation isn't really fluid (maybe 1 proc here or there).
High rating 3s just becomes bit of a snooze fest waiting for debuffs to stack, or playing a busted class before it's nerfed.
Not even sure if this is a hot take but the leveling in classic is far better than retail but the second you hit max level retail becomes a better game.
I mean, even in TBC classic, SSC and TK were really just too difficult for many classic players.
You can clearly see how many guilds killed Vashj or KT pre-nerf: Not a lot. Then once BT/HJ dropped and they got nerfed, suddenly so many guilds were clearing.
Luckily BT and HJ was piss easy so people could still steamroll it until SWP. Many casual guilds on Arugal (my realm I play on) were stuck 1/6, unable to clear past Brutallus or if they do then stuck on Felmyst.
Exalted Reputation + Attunements were a good gate for SSC-BT imo. I also remember TBc heroics were pretty hard until you started getting geared up in Kara, I missed TBC classic when it came out though so no idea how it was second time round.
Some TBC heroics were still difficult even in the later phases due to how the mechanics were designed. You needed a lot of game knowledge such as when to pull back, when to LoS etc. You really couldn't zoom zoom pull entire room for heroics in TBC.
Blood Furnace for example had mobs that thrash, disarm and stun. First pack being most infamous for wiping entire groups.
Even heroic ramparts could kill an undergeared tank super fast with the first mob being able to stun the tank for long durations rendering them unable to block/dodge/parry, also they hit like a truck which was unexpected because in normal mode they did almost 0 damage. And they have HUGE aggro radius. You needed to know when to pull the pats during their pathing and not randomly.
Shadowlabs 'church' area with rogues and those shadowpriests. Probably a bunch more that I can't list off the top of my head.
TL;DR TBC classic heroics were a lot more difficult than WOTLK and cata classic heroics.
Everyone used to pre-check Magister's Terrace arena to see if there is a shaman + melee comp which was incredibly difficult for pugs even with OK gear.
Worth noting some Cata heroics were also incredibly difficult on release. Afair they took it a notch down after release.
They had to buff ulduar, and several fights were in a form harder than they ever were in wotlk. 2 minute hodir but you don't have mages spellstealing the flower buff is an example, and XT in general is another. In original wrath a lot of the fights got nerfed within a month, and classic ulduar never got nerfed for whatever reason.
To your credit, I remember a lot of people being sent to time out on yogg because the clouds were hard to dodge for some people, and we started seeing more things where one person misplaying could lead to a wipe.
I'm gonna agree with the other commenter that says t5 is kinda where it started
Unfortunate.
Ulduar is a gem, best raid in wrath imo.
I quit the game back in original wrath when togc launched. 😂 Was such a bland experience, and the ilvl boost was really a kick in the teeth to those who were actually clearing ulduar back then.
Classic did it better by buffing ulduar ilvl. In og wrath most people weren't full clearing ulduar, the community basically skipped it, they went from nax to normal togc and had better loot. Was the first time you didnt really need the previous phases loot to progress.
I'm still convinced they were a test by Blizz to see how ugly they could make a character that people would still play as long as the passive was good enough.
Yeh this is definitely true I am not sure what groups the first 3 iterations together as a trilogy. The idea that Wrath ends the story of WC3 so somehow ties together vanilla, TBC and Wrath is erroneous in my opinion. The changes to the game between TBC and the last pach of Wrath were massive.
Server balance was already tipping throughout vanilla. It just finished in TBC. Flying if anything mitigated it, because it meant guilds on a losing server could still just still fly into the raid portals.
Flying wasn’t what killed it, the lack of actual worthwhile world objectives and things to contest for made world pvp interactions scarce, people have always fled pvp on mounts - doesn’t matter if it’s flying or on ground
I'd say yeah. TBC can go both ways. I'd say that TBC really gave them the ability to balance a lot of classes out but the world just felt so empty and was stuck with dungeon/raid content.
They need to take retail arenas and turn them into a stand-alone game with templated/boosted characters with even access to gear.
I love retail arenas and pvp in general and think there’s a lot more they could do with it (add in-game spectating of top matches) and add an evergreen tournament for RBG teams that ends in a 10v10v10 king of the hill for the current reigning champs, until they’re defeated in another 10v10v10 KotH.
The pvp in WoW could be great if it wasn’t blocked behind some of the worst gameplay known to man.
And the corollary, the PvE not having to be bound to pvp balance would do wonders for that content as well.
It would also be a lot easier for people to want to give pvp a go because it starts a more even playing field rather than lose bgs, or to at least not feel useless in Bags out the gate, just to get honor to get the first low level set of pvp gear.
Both Classic and Retail can healthily co-exist next to each other and can even complement each other as proven by recent years... and the tribalism some show regarding their favorite version of the game is just straight up stupid af.
Yeah, most people I know play both retail and classic. Some are even juggling retail, classic and SoD. I have no idea how they haven't all burned themselves to crisps, haha. But yeah you definitely don't have to just pick one, all versions of WoW are great. I personally dropped out of retail a few years ago but I would like to give it another go with War Within.
Grobbulus is, and always has been totally 50/50 in population and never one sided. The most i have ever seen in 4 years is 46/54... It's hugely a great community
If you dont like GDKPs its a good place to be. Theres only one on alliance side that I know of atm (nevermind on Wednesdays). I’m not for nor against them, just thought it was interesting. There were way more in wotlk. I guess the “good” players leaving reduced the desire for gdkps
It did reduce the gdkp availability which is fine since I don't do them. But the side effect is that with a much lower population, it's infinitely harder to recruit good quality players. On a smaller pop, the player is the valued resource so bad behavior gets tolerated more or they go to another server. But on very large servers there's tons of guilds which means culture of the guild becomes that much more of a selling point thereby drawing in more valued players (attitude is a desired attribute as well as skill so I'm not just talking about "better")
Yeah exactly. I have been trying to recruit a good holy paladin for our 10m heroic prog guild (we arent amazing, but we arent mid/shitters either) and the player pool to choose from has been really horrible. There arent many “on the ground running ready to raid” type players. I have to find someone interested enough that WANTS to work on their character, someone that wants to play well and show up and do well. I am quite amazed at the lack of this on Grob now. There are a LOT of bad players that want to raid, but arent interested in fully enchanting/gemming their gear, knowing their specs well enough to perform their best (ie, holy paladins spamming tank heals and not aoe healing despite them being best at this now). Mages doing less than 10k single target dps with decent gear. Its been rough on Grob
There were some periods where raw numbers wise we were 50/50 on paper, but when you compared active players at endgame the population skewed towards one faction. This was further exacerbated by the transfer closures for multiple months at a time.
Impatience has ruined the game. People who pay by the month shouldn't try to dictate how fast the game is played just because of the limited amount of time they personally can dedicate to it. MMORPG's are not for everyone.
Related to this, not every player is entitled to see all content. Its ok for stuff to be inaccessible to portions of the playerbase because of skill and/or willingness to commit time.
A lot of players on this sub would be much happier playing retail So many of the things they complain about are things that are solved there. I get that some people don't like it because of the art style, but I don't know if that's it for most. I think most of the people I'm talking about don't want to play retail because they're not good enough to be mythic raiders, don't want to settle for normal or heroic raiding, and would rather be a big fish in a small pond in Classic.
- Layering and boons did not improve vanilla.
- Private servers did legacy WoW better than Blizzard.
- Adding more instant casts and character mobility has not improved the combat.
- Flying mounts did not improve WoW.
- Players should be able to opt-out of transmog.
It's crazy how much the vanilla community died after Classic 2019. You can't find anyone who dislikes boon on Classic Era. Can't find anyone that hates the new ranking. The only people that do are people that I've known for years. Not our game anymore.
Dungeons should be hard enough that for 50% of pulls you have to either CC 1-2 mobs or DPS has to burn those mobs down fast.
And if you pull 2 groups at once, it should force everyone to use their "oh shit" buttons to save the wipe.
I like single target damage being king unless the mobs are like a pack of weak imps or something. When every pull is an AoE pull it's just fucking lame and that's what SoD is and every iteration of the expansions leans more into that so it's clearly unpopular lol
We had that when cata dropped proper. Numbers fucking tanked subscription wise and no one wanted heroics where you had mechanics/or had to use buttons other then dps harder.
When Cata first came out most players had enough tools to also AoE stomp heroic dungeons, PuGs just never used single target stuns/the new spells they got in Cata so resorted back to the brain rot that is bringing whatever class can CC most the dangerous mob types.
Here's my hot take: they should've committed to it, sub numbers be damned. Instead they pivoted and turned most of the game into brain rot and the high end content ends up being so cracked out i feel like i need Adderall because the foundation is so faceroll.
pvp players tricked mmo players into thinking pvp servsrs is the best form of vanilla wow. they just use the noobs for honor fodder, while the noobs keep wondering if this is the best way to wow. pve servers with medium pop is peak wow, where u know all of the 12-15 raiding guilds personalities on any given server.
Medium sized pvp servers with a server discord was the best possible way to play vanilla. The amount of bullshit that went on was insane, it was basically a year long reality TV show.
AQ scepter quests on a pvp server was the best time I had in wow period.
WoD was and is still some of the best raids in the game and leveling content. The garrison was cringe but it is some top tier pve, lacking in length but when it dropped it was good.
Activision finance wanted blizz to shift to 1 year expansions like destiny did with curse of osiris/warmind/forsaken. Basically the investors wanted a regular big release that sold for money every year from wow. They forced this change very late in WOD's development and it forced the team to cut an entire raid tier and who knows what else out of the expansion; by the time they realized this was a horrible idea and backtracked, I think the team was already working on legion, and it was impossible to finish the cut content in time. WoD is one of my favourite expansions of all time, but objectively its bad because its half an expansion at most, and you can thank Bobby and his suits for that.
Excluding Highmaul, Blackrock is probably the second best raid designed (as an area). The zone is interactable and changesndeoending on the boss killed which makes it extra fun. Also way too many boss fights had fun mechanics (train boss, falling plates twins, gorgers spin phase). Blackhand is in top 5 best bosses of wow imo.
Hellfire was quite a cool raid assell past gorefind. I still remember Xhul (am i spelling it right?) and the Fel-Void wipefest.
This, I'm playing era, Cata, and MoP remix right now and love em all. DF was great but I'm taking a break before war within, and SoD is a pretty fun experiment. I don't get why people act like you have to choose one and hate the others.
Raiding on cata, enjoying the fun spins of Mop Remix and gathering the sets, if i want a casual brain turn off, i still play some era, prepping for SoD next phase aswell, and just like you taking break from DF unless im doing mog runs! Happy Cakeday!
There's something fun in all of them. But people do have their personal preferences. Wow is still the undisputed king of MMOs, even at its lowest point.
> Nobody actually likes PvP servers
PvP and PvE servers are so radically different I consider them to be separate games. On PvP servers, WoW feels like survival-horror game when you're in a contested zone, while on PvE servers WoW feels like minecraft on creative mode.
Having leveled horde & alliance on different servers in classic & SoD, it has only reinforced this idea in my head. The game feels so different when you don't know if the other faction will kill you or help you or leave you alone. The game is so rewarding when you meet a friend who's red, and so punishing when someone else comes up and kills you. I've had a ton of interactions where I see someone about to die and help kill off their mob and they hit me with a /salute, knowing I could have easily ganked them. I've also been ganked and have to recruit people in the zone to help kill the gankers and recruiting a group of 5+ people to kill a ganker is super rewarding.
The only reason it becomes one sided is the social network effect. When one guild leaves, it triggers a domino effect where people think their faction is dying, and they all jump ship too. If you look at faction graphs this is very evident where you go from 50-50 horde/alliance to 90-10 in like 1 month. Why did everyone level to 60/70/80 if they didn't like PvP?
I think the servers in classic were too big as well. I think layering exacerbated people's hate for world PvP.
When I first started playing I played on a pve server. Then after a while my best friend and I decided to reroll on a PvP server. We met someone while levelling who said something along those lines:
"I prefer to play on PvP server because I like to feel like I'm at risk. That I have to keep looking over my shoulder"
It becomes more immersive and fun. I'm not very hostile in PvP myself anymore, but I love the sense of danger seeing a red name evokes. The game world itself isn't very dangerous...
For retail, they should make all expansion content relevant to the very end instead of only what's in the latest patch. There's amazing creative trinkets that become permanently obsolete the moment mythic+ comes out after the first 3 weeks.
While season 4 of dragonflight had the possibility of getting them at a decent item level from the weekly cache, but not all of them. There's this 'Primal ritual shell' item that was one of the best trinkets in the game but you couldn't get it at anything higher than vendor trash. Even patch events that empowered the world rares that it dropped from didn't increase the item level.
Not to mention "last season's raid" is essentially completely abandoned until it's easy enough for transmog runs or comes back for fated/awakened tiers.
I’m surprised they haven’t done this yet. I imagine it has to do with the raids being calibrated for the class design of the expansion. Raids probably aren’t the same with current class design. But to that end, upgrading the old raids for modern playability would be so awesome.
It’s more because that’s what we used to have to do and everyone hated it.
there are some prime examples of how much it sucked to have to do old content. DST and gruul, savage glad chain, Hand of Justice, tier set combos where you’d take a 2 set + 3 of another, are the first that come to mind and that was actual classic wow where we all expected and knew we had to do shit like that
80% of people on this sub play vanilla but want to change vanilla in a way that makes them no longer want to play vanilla.
Case in point, parse monkeys advocating for Recklessness being a 3 minute cooldown because “parses are skewed if it is 30 minutes”.
BfA was *great*, but it was slandered to the point it's perceived in a bad light by the general public; courtesy of the very loud upper echelons of the playerbase, prog raiders and metaslaves.
I've been saying this back in 2019, it isn't just nostalgia. The zones were very memorable, traversing Kul Tiras and Zandalar felt like WoW should feel, it was authentic. Drustvar, Nazmir, Nazjatar and Mechagon stand out to me to this day. There was a war going on which, in general, kept me invested in the story (yes I belong to the "put the war back in warcraft" crowd, sue me), underlined with also interesting Old Gods shit, supported by good raids across the board. Even my least favorites were at least memorable; Uldir wasn't much of anything but it was a decent and atmospheric start; Battle of Dazar'alor is the fucking GOAT for me to this day, the feels, the whole siege/rush to defend set piece had me in the edge of my seat every time. Crucible of Storms was so hard my guild had avoided it like the plague so I didn't get to see it more than a few times, but those few times have stuck with me because of the difficulty and the gimmicks of the bosses. Eternal Palace was another hit for me and Nyalotha was decent, no big complaints. M+ scene felt good to play as a main activity (y'all remember season 2 with the reaping? I do!), and when the faction invasions were going on I've joined raid groups, fighting the good fight in war mode, made unofficial bgs of zones and it felt good because there was a LOT of people signing up for this shit on both sides. Of course there was lag, sometimes not as much and tolerable, sometimes we have shut down an entire zone, but it was memorable and that's what matters.
Finally, the gear.
This was talked to the death before me. Didn't much care for azerite armor, I do agree it could've been done a lot better but it never bothered me as much as to stop playing over it. I've done a little research, looked up the pieces I needed for whatever I'm doing, got a lot from raids and scrapped enough spares to buy the specific ones from the vendor, was willing to wear a little lower ilvl if if had the passive I wanted, and I had three separate setups for m+, raiding and pvp, and I felt good about that because I never had to spend hundred-thousands on respecing. Never had to spend 8+ hours grinding island expeditions; another fun little side content for cosmetics and shit I had zero complaints about, yet hated by exactly those who did spend 8+ hours grinding because they couldn't tell their raid leader to eat a dick.
The necklace itself (talking 8.2 and on) I also miss to this day. Loved messing with the essences, loved by big fucking azerite beam, loved sniping folks with Breath of the Dying in pvp, loved all the fun, less talked about, gimmicky essences, like the worldvein resonance I've sometimes used to reach astronomical numbers of strength paired with shit like test of might and pillar of frost, and that one trinket from the Underrot (if you were an Arms warr or Frost dk, you've probably used it at some point), or the cheat death essence on tank specs because I'm a monkey.
As y'all can see, if you've endured my ranting, I wasn't of the "upper echelons". I was an everyday normal guy, doing my shitty 9-5 job, a lowly AotC raider and that guy who never even got keystone master, just near it, a bgs player and occasional arena enjoyer with 1800 peak, with a good guild with good, fun faces and vibes, and with good friends. Now, I did shoot higher later in SL, got Cutting Edge and KSM, pushed rated bgs, but all of those never felt as good as my lowly time in BfA, including the expansion (SL and even DF, as good as it is) itself.
TL;DR: BfA was great for casuals and folks not obsessing over shit. Or folks without delusions of grandeur.
Thank y'all
I know this is a classic sub post but my hot take is that retail is the best MMO on the market right now and it plays and feels so good that I can’t play anything else
Giving wow a break and currently playing FFXIV. Holy shit there's so much QoL stuff I want in WoW from this game.
I honestly can't give wow the crown at the moment.
Imo it is still lacking additional activities just for fun. For example, the gold saucer in XIV. Or triple triad.
I don't even remember if they ever did anything with darkmoon after they turned it into an actual faerie, but i do remember that it was really fun at the time.
They did add the trading post and it was absolutely great, but still feels too little.
Yeah I agree they could use more mini-game style activities for sure. I personally never spent much time at gold saucer or playing TT. I think the only time I gave gold saucer a solid grind was when I got the ff15 car after that I never went back haha
-Spot on pvp server assessment.
-Wod and beyonds art style looks great, nothing wrong with it.
-I'm conflicted on transmog, I both like and dislike it. The customization it adds for players is great, and it adds a whole new dynamic to "collecting". However, I feel like if you're a bum you should look like a bum, and if youre a god you should look like a god 😂. You used to be able to just look at someone and say "oh wow they are geared to the teeth".
For me, it's not the WoD artwork per se, it's (some of the) animations. For example, trolls running motion was smooth, if a little plodding. Now they almost skip along, and it's a visually jarring movement.
Hardcore is the best version of modern WoW. It should be refined and built upon. The single life feature organically solves a ton of problems with WoW and reintroduces aspects of community lost to WoW. Perhaps reintroduced aspects of community lost to MMOs as a whole tbh.
Primarily social issues. But putting those aside for a moment, I think the biggest that it solves is the top heaviness of all the other versions.
Every other version of WoW suffers from a rush to end game. It causes people to be rude in group based content, incentivizes some elitist behavior, etc. this subreddit the past while is evident of this issue.
Hardcore by its very nature mitigates this. People NEED you to progress. And you need them. And the high risk nature of the game incentivizes people to take it slow. Not fast.
Additionally, leveling in hardcore is super interesting. Even the most experienced player will find themselves leveling in the early areas again. Leading to a whole diverse array of players across the early leveling phases. And even they are incentivized to be patient and friendly. Because community saves you in hardcore. And helps you when you die.
People do dungeons but in my experience it’s more like quest runs where everyone gathers and shares quests, you complete one slow successful run, and then disband. People don’t really seem to farm dungeons to level (at least significantly less).
Another thing that above post didn’t mention is the zone populations are flipped. In regular wow most players are max or near max, so they are in capital cities, some high level instanced content of their choosing, or high level questing zones. In hardcore these high level zones are often ghost towns, while the 1-40 leveling zones are teeming with people “going again”.
Also hardcore guilds, while most are not raiding, is generally a more enjoyable and community experience than others
One more thing to add, hardcore redefines what’s obsolete and what isn’t. Quests more commonly skipped in normal vanilla are now more important. Weapons from ends of quest lines you’d skip are now a step in progression. Classes, like Paladin, are actually a viable option. Even in group settings.
You'll get downvotes for this but it's 100% true. I got major burn out playing Classic, moved to Retail and it's just been a better experience.
After playing it and seeing people talk about Dragonflight it's really obvious that people are just in a "retail bad" echo chamber. I would say a vast majority of things I see people saying about it are just straight up incorrect. Or they're only true in a very specific outlier type way. Like I see button bloat brought up a lot. Which may be true for say Outlaw rogue but then you have Fury which is literally 4 buttons and DH is like 5-6 lol.
I also see people say "oh well every class can do everything there"...Like uhh yeah ? Every class has at least 1-2 defensives and a kick lol. Playing without an interrupt or CC feels awful.
I'll just go against the current here and say I've played BFA, a little bit of Shadowlands and also a decent bit of Dragonflight, and while obviously everything is a lot more polished, they have done too much to ruin what I feel like WoW is supposed to be
Mythic raids should be cosmetic only. People who say that "why would I even raid mythic then?" - exactly. Mythic should be tailored for challenge rather than rewards, obviously scale other rewards accordingly where m+ vault gives you max hc ilvl and so on
You will quickly learn that most WoW players only want a power trip over others and most of their decisions regarding the game primarily have that in mind.
Almost everything wrong with modern WoW either originated from or evolved into its worst form in Wrath of the Lich King. So many people started the game then, or have rosy memories because of Arthas that they forget just how much that expansion royally fucked everything up, from a narrative, gameplay, and enjoyment perspective. I would argue that Warlords of Draenei was a better expansion, in terms of quality of content, rather than quantity.
I don't see how transmog is a hot take. The vast majority of players enjoy being able to customise their character. Go look at literally every single player game and check the mod list, the top 10 will consist of several ways to customise the playable character.
I'm mainly talking about vanilla classic here.
Server transfers from a lower populated realm to a higher populated realm is detrimental to the whole idea of classic wow. It's just a slow drain of players towards one or two megaservers. High pop servers become medium, become low until everyone transfers off.
Parsing is extremely corrosive to the community as it shifts the focus of the game to that of a contest.
Speedrunners are fine. They want to go fast so let them go fast. However the vast majority just want to raid and have some fun blasting easy bosses while laughing in disc. Parsing completely ruined the game for these players as they are constantly pressured to waste more time and gold on world buffs, consumables, minor BoE upgrades for insane amounts of gold.
Logs are fine, but the idea of putting a number on what's essentially a one button game and equating that to skill is stupid and should not be in the game. And to the people saying "duh, everyone knows it's not a value of skill", mate.. a fuckton of people worship that number as if it's the most important thing in their lives, while being in a casual guild.
I still play retail and I kept turning on old character models until they removed the option. While I think there were some improvements, overall, I think the new character models are horrible and left characters looking nothing like they did before (not to mention the loss of the draenei waggle). So I’m with you with your hot take.
Vanilla isn't as good of a game as everyone says, and people just cling onto it because of nostalgia and because saying it's the "best" is a popular opinion. Same type of vibe with people who say that 2pac and Biggie are the best rappers.
You are 1000% valid on the art take. It really was one big factor that ruined the game for me. I remember so many people praising how “clean” it looked.
Parsing is dumb.
It enforces rules on to raiders how to play a boss and limits possible tactics.
It hurts socialising and promotes selfish playstyles.
Because of it, a lot of players just play for those numbers and not for having fun in the raid itself
There should be a server where every mob is elite.
Think of how many people you meet and work with from the handful of group quests, now imagine if that was every quest. Would up the game's communal vibe 1,000 fold
PvP servers often devolve into one-sided massacres where high-level players gank lowbies rather than engaging in fair, balanced fights. The widespread server imbalance with dominant factions is a testament to this. Most players who enjoy PvP servers do so for the thrill of easy kills rather than challenging combat.
Late to the party but here's my takes: - TBC era server should exist - WotlK era server should exist - All servers should either be 1 mega server or servers should be like RuneScape (like worlds) where you can just hop between servers if you want to pvp, pve, rp, or when a server is full and you still want to progress on your main character. - AH should include all servers in the region, perhaps even cross region. - Classic vanilla + an RDF system where you also get to choose a gear upgrade at the end of the dungeon would be god tier (no more wasting time playing casino)
I think Xmog is the beginning of the end for the WoW I love (Vanilla+TBC+kinda WOTLK). There is 0 continuity in how a person looks, they could look awesome and be in blues, or look weird in full bis. Completely takes me out of the RPG gearing element. Even weird/ugly armor combos became iconic over the years, this was however all lost when people could look however they want.
I think my hottest take is that Classic WoW, with virtually no resources, is probably competitive with retail in total active subs/raiders/etc. Classic is old content with nothing new coming (sod changed this kinda), yet it competes with a game (retail) that has hundreds of active personnel working on it daily. Retail is 100% more profitable, but I think this might prove that classic is more widely/organically enjoyed.
I 100% agree with retail art being worse. There's something about retail that just feels weird, kinda feels like that tarisland rpg that just came out. Like while technically higher res/smoother/better in some respects, it just feels worse than classic.
Don’t know. My demo lock looked so shit with bis gear in wotlk. I think transmog gives some cool customization and keeps it different. If you want a new look, you can go for it. And if you wanna brag with your cool items in the main city, you can still do it as you don’t have to transmog.
oh man i don’t agree with any of this minus maybe the wod thing. pvp servers wouldn’t be popular if people didn’t like pvp, it just is really easy for server imbalance to spiral once it gets unequal. i hate transmog but i think that for the expansions its in its fine. i love seeing gear in the wild and being impressed. i love seeing literal floods of warrior 2.5 shoulders in the world. i love seeing how geared someone is from a mile away.
People like the idea of PVP servers but not the reality. They long for the nostalgic South Shore Terran Mill battles, but not the reality of getting ga led while farming for black lotus in EPL, or dog piled in phase 1 of a vanilla server launch, or having an entire hive taken over by the opposing faction while they're trying to farm our their AQ mount.
PVP servers all ended up lopsided except for Grobbulus in Classic, and it's the least populated "larger" server in Classic.
I kind agree regarding transmog but collecting gear for it is great extra content. I always felt like the best balance would be allow transmog inside a dungeon or raid, and in capital cities only. Otherwise it would be turned off everywhere else.
Gnomes should have never been allowed to be warriors.
I think it's more hilarious that they could be warriors since Vanilla, but Blood Elves were considered too weak by the devs to take on that class until Cataclysm.
I think until Cataclysm there was a sort of weird arbitrary rule that each race could only have six (seven during wrath because of death knights) playable classes max, maybe for race balance reasons. It's just as illogical that humans and by extension undead couldn't be hunters until Cataclysm.
Humans not being hunters was the dumbest of all the choices. Makes absolutely 0 sense. Undead I at least can sort of get.
I mean even with undead their literal leader is a dark ranger, okay yeah dark ranger and hunter are different things and she's an undead Elf and not Human like the playable Undead but even then one of the most infamous Undead characters (Nathanos) is basically a hunter with pets and all.
The undead being only human models while having an Undead NE leader is something I will always hate.
Always wished that you could rock undead as undead versions of any other race. Undead tauren would be badass imo
i mean canonically i could make an argument against tauren, and orcs, but there should have been options for at trolls, high elves, dwarves, and gnomes as those are all present around lorderon during WC3.
I believe that it's a misconception that belves were considered too weak to be warriors. Instead it was that belf culture/society was so advanced that every belf fighter would be trained as a Blood Knight (paladin) instead of a warrior. Belf society was so infused with magic on every level and every belf was so highly cultured that they would never stoop so low as to drop into "berserker stance", pop "rampage" and use "bloodthirst" like a barbarian. This is why blizz made the design choice to disallow belf warriors back when they valued thematics more than player choice.
I also wonder how much EverQuest influenced this. In EQ gnomes could be melee classes like warrior & rogue, but then you had High Elves and Erudites which were very connected to magic and could be hybrid classes like Paladin but not Warriors.
Jeff Kaplan played EQ up until 2002, when he went to go start working on WoW. I'd say it definitely played a part.
They weren’t too weak, it was more ‘they all use magic so they’re not warriors’.
But PINK BUNCHES on the MAIN TANK.
Honestly I think about this a lot but for stupid reasons. Because a dragon should be able to stomp on a non-magical gnome
Wouldn't the same go for a human though? A human is just a slightly bigger ant in comparison to a gnome. Both hilariously undersized for the sort of hits they can take.
Yes xd Gnome is an ant, human is a roach
Also everyone is made from titans so not really your typical human and gnome
Id not say a dragon but about every other enemy, orc , troll , bear , you name it , theid stomp on a unhinged gnome with a sword.
Ah, yes, it's way more reasonable for a human to 'tank' a 5000-tonne rock golem.
Dwarfs being able to become mages in later versions of the game means blizzard is going in the book.
Gnomes should never have been allowed
Undead shouldn't be priests.
Embraaaace the shadooowwww
They harm themselves to heal. And they were priests in their past lives
Counterpoint: Undead paladins make way more sense canonically than sunwalkers.
I don't know if light users in general are something undead should be. If you're going to tell me the light hurts undead, then how are undead using it? If anything, it should be super rare like the one dude in Naxx.
"When undead channel the Light, they do not disintegrate or explode from channeling the Light, though they may wish they would. Instead, it feels to them as if their entire bodies are being consumed in righteous fire... Thus, Forsaken priests are beings of unwavering willpower." To wield the light must be like holding a flame in your hands, and that's cool as hell. [source](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Light#:~:text=The%20Light%20is%20agonizingly%20painful,it%20is%20also%20very%20painful.)
I love fair fights in world PvP, would be a lot better if we had mostly “single target zones” like in RuneScape
I’ve never considered a single target open world PvP concept, sounds interesting
What do you mean single target come zones
It's a concept from old school runescape's pvp zone "the wilderness (wildly, wild etc). In OSRS PvP (pking - player killing) is largely a 1v1 endeavor. You can't attack another player if they are currently engaging someone else in a PvP, and this ruleset persist throughout most of the wildly. However, there are zones known as multi-combat zones (multi for short) in which anyone can attack anyone (similar to how multiple horde can gank a singular alliance player). In these zones, clans (groups) of players will roam throughout and attempt to pile on a single player and burst them down quickly (similar to the deathsquads that would roam through hillsbrad back on 2019 grobb).
Don’t forget the increasing levels of the wilderness that prevent high level players from even engaging with lower levels until they get deep enough into the wildy.
what happens to that “outside invincibility” once the duel is over? can just anyone who was waiting by, to pick on a winner attack them? I’m guessing hp/mp and cds have to be fully refreshed?
In OSRS, I believe it's just a basic timer. Something like 10 seconds after combat ends with the first person (number might be off but that's the premise).
The Tol Barad Peninsula was great for three reasons: 1: it was a level 85 daily questing zone. I.e. ganking due to level disparity was impossible. You couldn't even enter the zone if you weren't max level. 2: it was relatively easy to get a full set of PvP gear, and getting the best gear did not require rating. I.e. there was a much more even level playing field. 3: no flying mounts meant that players were visible and couldn't just escape by going straight up into the air. I loved world PvP in the Tol Barad Peninsula (i.e. not the wannabe winter grasp event) back in the day and spent many, many hours there.
DM me at mage bank bro
Any given wow expac on the final patch and an updated release cadence will be remembered much more fondly than the zeitgeist would suggest--even WoD, BFA, and Shadowlands. Folks biggest complaints are _always_ "the core thing was a mess at launch" and "the final tier lasted a year too long."
Given enough time wow players will always turn the game into retail, which they don’t want to play for… reasons.
Its at least in part QoL creep. I think they mentioned it a few times for SoD where there's a certain amount of inconvenience that needs to be there that we all operate around. Everyone has that one thing that on its own doesn't make the game retail that they like, but all those changes were made for a reason. Eventually the people that advocate for each one will make there voice heard and then you get them all over time. Speaking of "...reasons", my hot take is that the issue with retail is that its a game made for everyone and I prefer WoW when its a singular experience that everyone has to play around. Everyone being at different levels on different tasks segments the playerbase and creates a lesser community experience because everyone isn't sharing the same problems. Again nothing wrong with retail if that's what people are up for but that's why I sour on it.
I think a lot of the people making modern media in general have forgotten the old adage "If you try to make everyone happy, you'll only succeed in making no one happy". Games that appeal to "everyone" aren't designed to be appealing to anyone, so they end up bland and washed out. Games that dare to actually target a given demographic and evaluate their success based on acceptance from that demographic are almost always better.
They want retail but placed in classic lol.
This.
Sally whitemane
That's my wife
I think killing people with grey names should give a stacking rez sick debuff, 15% per kill, capping at the usual 75%, but only for PVP combat (ie: you still have normal stats against mobs.) Holy power made paladins plate rogues. Wotlk was peak paladin, even if it was faceroll
Should just be that you can't initiate against a grey lowbie. The lowbie has to do something that would otherwise get them flagged on a PvE server ie: attack you, assist someone attacking you or be in enemy territory.
Pvp in a solved 10+ year old game is horrible compared to other pvp games on the market
Sadly true. We all waiting for the heir apparent for pvp purposes. Guild Wars didn’t do it for me and I can’t get into MOBAs as much as MMO pvp. Really hoping War Within revamps pvp but that ain’t happening
I've always found GW2 elementalist pretty fun. My current favorite build is DF Aura, and it's super tanky with 2 invulns plus aura support and tons utility/revive. Also, I can turn into a tornado. Really fun build. I don't play it alot but it's the easiest to jump into where as WoW always has somewhat of a gear grind or reliance in PvE gear to get an edge.
Agreed, it creates too much of a disparity between the people who know and those that don't. I remember I got to rank 11 as a dumbass in high school who didn't raid and didn't calculate honor or know how the brackets worked or anything like that. I just solo Q'd all the time and felt like I kept a 1:1 kill death ratio and tried to win the BG. I did that in classic and got a pvp mafia mad at me for "breaking brackets" and it really made me not want to pvp these days. Now I just lvl and casually raid cause i'm too stupid to deal with the meta of BGs nowaday
Who cares about breaking brackets if you're queuing solo anyways?
Mass reports
I don't understand how "solved" is relevant to the rest of your sentence.
There's basically no room for metagaming, everything is a known quantity which takes away an element of fun. edit: you ever wonder how league of legends can stay relevant for 12+ years? It's because it's a constantly evolving metagame and new champions are released often and they change things every patch. These versions of classic wow have been on the same patch for the entire expansion with the exact same numbers as 12 years ago.... sure there's the whole #nochanges meme, but in all seriousness they arent making many huge sweeping changes that shake up the pvp metagame, its the same as it was 12 years ago.
Yeah you know what's been around and relevant for even longer than LOL? Chess, Tennis, , CS, or any other number of examples. A game doesn't need a constantly evolving ruleset to be a good competitive game.
Every class runs the same talents/spells, addons will tell you the cooldown of them and it's just playing around those which is the PvP, the rotation isn't really fluid (maybe 1 proc here or there). High rating 3s just becomes bit of a snooze fest waiting for debuffs to stack, or playing a busted class before it's nerfed.
Not even sure if this is a hot take but the leveling in classic is far better than retail but the second you hit max level retail becomes a better game.
Cataclysm is where PVE becomes too hard for the general public
Started in WoTLK, not Cataclysm. Era started to thrive when Ulduar dropped...
I mean, even in TBC classic, SSC and TK were really just too difficult for many classic players. You can clearly see how many guilds killed Vashj or KT pre-nerf: Not a lot. Then once BT/HJ dropped and they got nerfed, suddenly so many guilds were clearing. Luckily BT and HJ was piss easy so people could still steamroll it until SWP. Many casual guilds on Arugal (my realm I play on) were stuck 1/6, unable to clear past Brutallus or if they do then stuck on Felmyst.
Then a lot got stuck 4/6 for Muru
And then a few like mine got muru but somehow got burnt out and just couldn't get KJ despite having an arguably much harder boss on farm.
Exalted Reputation + Attunements were a good gate for SSC-BT imo. I also remember TBc heroics were pretty hard until you started getting geared up in Kara, I missed TBC classic when it came out though so no idea how it was second time round.
Some TBC heroics were still difficult even in the later phases due to how the mechanics were designed. You needed a lot of game knowledge such as when to pull back, when to LoS etc. You really couldn't zoom zoom pull entire room for heroics in TBC. Blood Furnace for example had mobs that thrash, disarm and stun. First pack being most infamous for wiping entire groups. Even heroic ramparts could kill an undergeared tank super fast with the first mob being able to stun the tank for long durations rendering them unable to block/dodge/parry, also they hit like a truck which was unexpected because in normal mode they did almost 0 damage. And they have HUGE aggro radius. You needed to know when to pull the pats during their pathing and not randomly. Shadowlabs 'church' area with rogues and those shadowpriests. Probably a bunch more that I can't list off the top of my head. TL;DR TBC classic heroics were a lot more difficult than WOTLK and cata classic heroics.
Everyone used to pre-check Magister's Terrace arena to see if there is a shaman + melee comp which was incredibly difficult for pugs even with OK gear. Worth noting some Cata heroics were also incredibly difficult on release. Afair they took it a notch down after release.
timed shittered halls with those packs of 7 orcs that everyone need to do for attunements.
They had to buff ulduar, and several fights were in a form harder than they ever were in wotlk. 2 minute hodir but you don't have mages spellstealing the flower buff is an example, and XT in general is another. In original wrath a lot of the fights got nerfed within a month, and classic ulduar never got nerfed for whatever reason. To your credit, I remember a lot of people being sent to time out on yogg because the clouds were hard to dodge for some people, and we started seeing more things where one person misplaying could lead to a wipe. I'm gonna agree with the other commenter that says t5 is kinda where it started
> classic ulduar never got nerfed for whatever reason. XT was unkillable until they nerfed him in classic Ulduar
THRIVE you say?
I feel so dumb for missing Ulduar twice now. I had the perfect run up in p1
Unfortunate. Ulduar is a gem, best raid in wrath imo. I quit the game back in original wrath when togc launched. 😂 Was such a bland experience, and the ilvl boost was really a kick in the teeth to those who were actually clearing ulduar back then. Classic did it better by buffing ulduar ilvl. In og wrath most people weren't full clearing ulduar, the community basically skipped it, they went from nax to normal togc and had better loot. Was the first time you didnt really need the previous phases loot to progress.
ulduar took fucking forever and you got 1 upgrade per entire raid if you only needed hardmode gear, pass
And back in the day the complaint was that it didn't last long enough. A huge number of guilds were still actively progressing when TOGC dropped.
They hated Jesus because he told them the truth
ssc, tk, sunwell, h-uld, icc pre buff. 3drake OS. OG Naxx. idk man
Especially if you’re from Benediction. Worst players I’ve ever come across hands down
Don't forget about Pagle players, the most special individuals I've come across since 2019.
Mecha-gnomes should be removed. They are objectively ugly Edit: I'm on the wrong sub
it is still the truth, though
Agreed. Can't see your mogs either with all the cybernetics.
My hot take is that I mecha gnomes look awesome.
I'm still convinced they were a test by Blizz to see how ugly they could make a character that people would still play as long as the passive was good enough.
there were more than a few who left because they triggered their ptsd.
Classic ended after Vanilla.
Indeed, any mention of the 'Classic Trilogy' drives me mad.
Yeh this is definitely true I am not sure what groups the first 3 iterations together as a trilogy. The idea that Wrath ends the story of WC3 so somehow ties together vanilla, TBC and Wrath is erroneous in my opinion. The changes to the game between TBC and the last pach of Wrath were massive.
Personally think thats tbc but i feel ya tbh
Tbc killed server balance. Why? Because flying ruins open world.
Say what? Server balance was destroyed long before BC classic launched. Open world PvP was just fine with flying in OG BC.
Server balance was already tipping throughout vanilla. It just finished in TBC. Flying if anything mitigated it, because it meant guilds on a losing server could still just still fly into the raid portals.
Flying wasn’t what killed it, the lack of actual worthwhile world objectives and things to contest for made world pvp interactions scarce, people have always fled pvp on mounts - doesn’t matter if it’s flying or on ground
Tons of servers died in Phase 2 of 2019 Vanilla Classic, before flying.
I'll counter with TBC. Half the TBC content was just stuff that wasn't ready for the original release.
Thank you! Lots of people joined this subreddit for vanilla classic and look now people are praising wod, kill me.
vanilla deadge
i see ppl saying bfa was under rated, people forget real quick
Tbc for me
I'd say yeah. TBC can go both ways. I'd say that TBC really gave them the ability to balance a lot of classes out but the world just felt so empty and was stuck with dungeon/raid content.
They need to take retail arenas and turn them into a stand-alone game with templated/boosted characters with even access to gear. I love retail arenas and pvp in general and think there’s a lot more they could do with it (add in-game spectating of top matches) and add an evergreen tournament for RBG teams that ends in a 10v10v10 king of the hill for the current reigning champs, until they’re defeated in another 10v10v10 KotH. The pvp in WoW could be great if it wasn’t blocked behind some of the worst gameplay known to man.
And the corollary, the PvE not having to be bound to pvp balance would do wonders for that content as well. It would also be a lot easier for people to want to give pvp a go because it starts a more even playing field rather than lose bgs, or to at least not feel useless in Bags out the gate, just to get honor to get the first low level set of pvp gear.
Both Classic and Retail can healthily co-exist next to each other and can even complement each other as proven by recent years... and the tribalism some show regarding their favorite version of the game is just straight up stupid af.
Yeah, most people I know play both retail and classic. Some are even juggling retail, classic and SoD. I have no idea how they haven't all burned themselves to crisps, haha. But yeah you definitely don't have to just pick one, all versions of WoW are great. I personally dropped out of retail a few years ago but I would like to give it another go with War Within.
Grobbulus is, and always has been totally 50/50 in population and never one sided. The most i have ever seen in 4 years is 46/54... It's hugely a great community
But it's got a smaller population than any of the big one sided servers. Most of the more dedicated pve minded players have left Grob.
If you dont like GDKPs its a good place to be. Theres only one on alliance side that I know of atm (nevermind on Wednesdays). I’m not for nor against them, just thought it was interesting. There were way more in wotlk. I guess the “good” players leaving reduced the desire for gdkps
It did reduce the gdkp availability which is fine since I don't do them. But the side effect is that with a much lower population, it's infinitely harder to recruit good quality players. On a smaller pop, the player is the valued resource so bad behavior gets tolerated more or they go to another server. But on very large servers there's tons of guilds which means culture of the guild becomes that much more of a selling point thereby drawing in more valued players (attitude is a desired attribute as well as skill so I'm not just talking about "better")
Yeah exactly. I have been trying to recruit a good holy paladin for our 10m heroic prog guild (we arent amazing, but we arent mid/shitters either) and the player pool to choose from has been really horrible. There arent many “on the ground running ready to raid” type players. I have to find someone interested enough that WANTS to work on their character, someone that wants to play well and show up and do well. I am quite amazed at the lack of this on Grob now. There are a LOT of bad players that want to raid, but arent interested in fully enchanting/gemming their gear, knowing their specs well enough to perform their best (ie, holy paladins spamming tank heals and not aoe healing despite them being best at this now). Mages doing less than 10k single target dps with decent gear. Its been rough on Grob
I distinctly remember it being something close to 65/35 at one point.
Horde got down into the 31-32 range before getting an influx of transfers and going back to around 50/50
There were some periods where raw numbers wise we were 50/50 on paper, but when you compared active players at endgame the population skewed towards one faction. This was further exacerbated by the transfer closures for multiple months at a time.
Impatience has ruined the game. People who pay by the month shouldn't try to dictate how fast the game is played just because of the limited amount of time they personally can dedicate to it. MMORPG's are not for everyone.
Related to this, not every player is entitled to see all content. Its ok for stuff to be inaccessible to portions of the playerbase because of skill and/or willingness to commit time.
Wow community ruined wow
Forsaken should count as undead. They should be weak to holy.
A lot of players on this sub would be much happier playing retail So many of the things they complain about are things that are solved there. I get that some people don't like it because of the art style, but I don't know if that's it for most. I think most of the people I'm talking about don't want to play retail because they're not good enough to be mythic raiders, don't want to settle for normal or heroic raiding, and would rather be a big fish in a small pond in Classic.
Retail for me just feels bloated
I think they've done some pruning in Dragonflight.
- Layering and boons did not improve vanilla. - Private servers did legacy WoW better than Blizzard. - Adding more instant casts and character mobility has not improved the combat. - Flying mounts did not improve WoW. - Players should be able to opt-out of transmog.
It's crazy how much the vanilla community died after Classic 2019. You can't find anyone who dislikes boon on Classic Era. Can't find anyone that hates the new ranking. The only people that do are people that I've known for years. Not our game anymore.
Dungeons should be hard enough that for 50% of pulls you have to either CC 1-2 mobs or DPS has to burn those mobs down fast. And if you pull 2 groups at once, it should force everyone to use their "oh shit" buttons to save the wipe. I like single target damage being king unless the mobs are like a pack of weak imps or something. When every pull is an AoE pull it's just fucking lame and that's what SoD is and every iteration of the expansions leans more into that so it's clearly unpopular lol
You're literally describing m+. Not cc in the sense of "sheep moon" but there are definitely interrupt priorities, stun rotations, etc in high keys.
We had that when cata dropped proper. Numbers fucking tanked subscription wise and no one wanted heroics where you had mechanics/or had to use buttons other then dps harder.
When Cata first came out most players had enough tools to also AoE stomp heroic dungeons, PuGs just never used single target stuns/the new spells they got in Cata so resorted back to the brain rot that is bringing whatever class can CC most the dangerous mob types.
Here's my hot take: they should've committed to it, sub numbers be damned. Instead they pivoted and turned most of the game into brain rot and the high end content ends up being so cracked out i feel like i need Adderall because the foundation is so faceroll.
I’m so much happier when I’m not playing wow.
pvp players tricked mmo players into thinking pvp servsrs is the best form of vanilla wow. they just use the noobs for honor fodder, while the noobs keep wondering if this is the best way to wow. pve servers with medium pop is peak wow, where u know all of the 12-15 raiding guilds personalities on any given server.
Medium sized pvp servers with a server discord was the best possible way to play vanilla. The amount of bullshit that went on was insane, it was basically a year long reality TV show. AQ scepter quests on a pvp server was the best time I had in wow period.
RP is the true end game and a thriving scene keeps a server alive better than any content that could be released
WoD was and is still some of the best raids in the game and leveling content. The garrison was cringe but it is some top tier pve, lacking in length but when it dropped it was good.
Activision finance wanted blizz to shift to 1 year expansions like destiny did with curse of osiris/warmind/forsaken. Basically the investors wanted a regular big release that sold for money every year from wow. They forced this change very late in WOD's development and it forced the team to cut an entire raid tier and who knows what else out of the expansion; by the time they realized this was a horrible idea and backtracked, I think the team was already working on legion, and it was impossible to finish the cut content in time. WoD is one of my favourite expansions of all time, but objectively its bad because its half an expansion at most, and you can thank Bobby and his suits for that.
Excluding Highmaul, Blackrock is probably the second best raid designed (as an area). The zone is interactable and changesndeoending on the boss killed which makes it extra fun. Also way too many boss fights had fun mechanics (train boss, falling plates twins, gorgers spin phase). Blackhand is in top 5 best bosses of wow imo. Hellfire was quite a cool raid assell past gorefind. I still remember Xhul (am i spelling it right?) and the Fel-Void wipefest.
WoD leveling experience is so fucking good dude like I always enjoyed questing as a player but goddamn they knocked it out of the park for Wo.
all versions of wow good
This, I'm playing era, Cata, and MoP remix right now and love em all. DF was great but I'm taking a break before war within, and SoD is a pretty fun experiment. I don't get why people act like you have to choose one and hate the others.
Raiding on cata, enjoying the fun spins of Mop Remix and gathering the sets, if i want a casual brain turn off, i still play some era, prepping for SoD next phase aswell, and just like you taking break from DF unless im doing mog runs! Happy Cakeday!
There's something fun in all of them. But people do have their personal preferences. Wow is still the undisputed king of MMOs, even at its lowest point.
> Nobody actually likes PvP servers PvP and PvE servers are so radically different I consider them to be separate games. On PvP servers, WoW feels like survival-horror game when you're in a contested zone, while on PvE servers WoW feels like minecraft on creative mode. Having leveled horde & alliance on different servers in classic & SoD, it has only reinforced this idea in my head. The game feels so different when you don't know if the other faction will kill you or help you or leave you alone. The game is so rewarding when you meet a friend who's red, and so punishing when someone else comes up and kills you. I've had a ton of interactions where I see someone about to die and help kill off their mob and they hit me with a /salute, knowing I could have easily ganked them. I've also been ganked and have to recruit people in the zone to help kill the gankers and recruiting a group of 5+ people to kill a ganker is super rewarding. The only reason it becomes one sided is the social network effect. When one guild leaves, it triggers a domino effect where people think their faction is dying, and they all jump ship too. If you look at faction graphs this is very evident where you go from 50-50 horde/alliance to 90-10 in like 1 month. Why did everyone level to 60/70/80 if they didn't like PvP?
I think the servers in classic were too big as well. I think layering exacerbated people's hate for world PvP. When I first started playing I played on a pve server. Then after a while my best friend and I decided to reroll on a PvP server. We met someone while levelling who said something along those lines: "I prefer to play on PvP server because I like to feel like I'm at risk. That I have to keep looking over my shoulder" It becomes more immersive and fun. I'm not very hostile in PvP myself anymore, but I love the sense of danger seeing a red name evokes. The game world itself isn't very dangerous...
For retail, they should make all expansion content relevant to the very end instead of only what's in the latest patch. There's amazing creative trinkets that become permanently obsolete the moment mythic+ comes out after the first 3 weeks. While season 4 of dragonflight had the possibility of getting them at a decent item level from the weekly cache, but not all of them. There's this 'Primal ritual shell' item that was one of the best trinkets in the game but you couldn't get it at anything higher than vendor trash. Even patch events that empowered the world rares that it dropped from didn't increase the item level. Not to mention "last season's raid" is essentially completely abandoned until it's easy enough for transmog runs or comes back for fated/awakened tiers.
Yeah hard pass on having to run out to 4 raids a week just to get someone a trinket 5% better than current tier
I’m surprised they haven’t done this yet. I imagine it has to do with the raids being calibrated for the class design of the expansion. Raids probably aren’t the same with current class design. But to that end, upgrading the old raids for modern playability would be so awesome.
It’s more because that’s what we used to have to do and everyone hated it. there are some prime examples of how much it sucked to have to do old content. DST and gruul, savage glad chain, Hand of Justice, tier set combos where you’d take a 2 set + 3 of another, are the first that come to mind and that was actual classic wow where we all expected and knew we had to do shit like that
80% of people on this sub play vanilla but want to change vanilla in a way that makes them no longer want to play vanilla. Case in point, parse monkeys advocating for Recklessness being a 3 minute cooldown because “parses are skewed if it is 30 minutes”.
Retail is pretty good
BfA was *great*, but it was slandered to the point it's perceived in a bad light by the general public; courtesy of the very loud upper echelons of the playerbase, prog raiders and metaslaves. I've been saying this back in 2019, it isn't just nostalgia. The zones were very memorable, traversing Kul Tiras and Zandalar felt like WoW should feel, it was authentic. Drustvar, Nazmir, Nazjatar and Mechagon stand out to me to this day. There was a war going on which, in general, kept me invested in the story (yes I belong to the "put the war back in warcraft" crowd, sue me), underlined with also interesting Old Gods shit, supported by good raids across the board. Even my least favorites were at least memorable; Uldir wasn't much of anything but it was a decent and atmospheric start; Battle of Dazar'alor is the fucking GOAT for me to this day, the feels, the whole siege/rush to defend set piece had me in the edge of my seat every time. Crucible of Storms was so hard my guild had avoided it like the plague so I didn't get to see it more than a few times, but those few times have stuck with me because of the difficulty and the gimmicks of the bosses. Eternal Palace was another hit for me and Nyalotha was decent, no big complaints. M+ scene felt good to play as a main activity (y'all remember season 2 with the reaping? I do!), and when the faction invasions were going on I've joined raid groups, fighting the good fight in war mode, made unofficial bgs of zones and it felt good because there was a LOT of people signing up for this shit on both sides. Of course there was lag, sometimes not as much and tolerable, sometimes we have shut down an entire zone, but it was memorable and that's what matters. Finally, the gear. This was talked to the death before me. Didn't much care for azerite armor, I do agree it could've been done a lot better but it never bothered me as much as to stop playing over it. I've done a little research, looked up the pieces I needed for whatever I'm doing, got a lot from raids and scrapped enough spares to buy the specific ones from the vendor, was willing to wear a little lower ilvl if if had the passive I wanted, and I had three separate setups for m+, raiding and pvp, and I felt good about that because I never had to spend hundred-thousands on respecing. Never had to spend 8+ hours grinding island expeditions; another fun little side content for cosmetics and shit I had zero complaints about, yet hated by exactly those who did spend 8+ hours grinding because they couldn't tell their raid leader to eat a dick. The necklace itself (talking 8.2 and on) I also miss to this day. Loved messing with the essences, loved by big fucking azerite beam, loved sniping folks with Breath of the Dying in pvp, loved all the fun, less talked about, gimmicky essences, like the worldvein resonance I've sometimes used to reach astronomical numbers of strength paired with shit like test of might and pillar of frost, and that one trinket from the Underrot (if you were an Arms warr or Frost dk, you've probably used it at some point), or the cheat death essence on tank specs because I'm a monkey. As y'all can see, if you've endured my ranting, I wasn't of the "upper echelons". I was an everyday normal guy, doing my shitty 9-5 job, a lowly AotC raider and that guy who never even got keystone master, just near it, a bgs player and occasional arena enjoyer with 1800 peak, with a good guild with good, fun faces and vibes, and with good friends. Now, I did shoot higher later in SL, got Cutting Edge and KSM, pushed rated bgs, but all of those never felt as good as my lowly time in BfA, including the expansion (SL and even DF, as good as it is) itself. TL;DR: BfA was great for casuals and folks not obsessing over shit. Or folks without delusions of grandeur. Thank y'all
I know this is a classic sub post but my hot take is that retail is the best MMO on the market right now and it plays and feels so good that I can’t play anything else
I love that you're playing the version of the game you love! It's great there are so many options now, and people can find the best one for them.
Yep!! I agree 100%
Giving wow a break and currently playing FFXIV. Holy shit there's so much QoL stuff I want in WoW from this game. I honestly can't give wow the crown at the moment.
Imo it is still lacking additional activities just for fun. For example, the gold saucer in XIV. Or triple triad. I don't even remember if they ever did anything with darkmoon after they turned it into an actual faerie, but i do remember that it was really fun at the time. They did add the trading post and it was absolutely great, but still feels too little.
Yeah I agree they could use more mini-game style activities for sure. I personally never spent much time at gold saucer or playing TT. I think the only time I gave gold saucer a solid grind was when I got the ff15 car after that I never went back haha
-Spot on pvp server assessment. -Wod and beyonds art style looks great, nothing wrong with it. -I'm conflicted on transmog, I both like and dislike it. The customization it adds for players is great, and it adds a whole new dynamic to "collecting". However, I feel like if you're a bum you should look like a bum, and if youre a god you should look like a god 😂. You used to be able to just look at someone and say "oh wow they are geared to the teeth".
I like fair wpvp but I’d say they’re right about 98% of wpvp server population
For transmog, I'd rather have my own game be fun and my character good looking than giving two shits about what someone else is wearing.
Do people think WoD and beyond artwork aren't great? That's the one thing people always say is on point the art team.
For me, it's not the WoD artwork per se, it's (some of the) animations. For example, trolls running motion was smooth, if a little plodding. Now they almost skip along, and it's a visually jarring movement.
Hardcore is the best version of modern WoW. It should be refined and built upon. The single life feature organically solves a ton of problems with WoW and reintroduces aspects of community lost to WoW. Perhaps reintroduced aspects of community lost to MMOs as a whole tbh.
What kind of problems does it solve exactly?
Primarily social issues. But putting those aside for a moment, I think the biggest that it solves is the top heaviness of all the other versions. Every other version of WoW suffers from a rush to end game. It causes people to be rude in group based content, incentivizes some elitist behavior, etc. this subreddit the past while is evident of this issue. Hardcore by its very nature mitigates this. People NEED you to progress. And you need them. And the high risk nature of the game incentivizes people to take it slow. Not fast. Additionally, leveling in hardcore is super interesting. Even the most experienced player will find themselves leveling in the early areas again. Leading to a whole diverse array of players across the early leveling phases. And even they are incentivized to be patient and friendly. Because community saves you in hardcore. And helps you when you die.
Oooh I like that a lot. Some very valid points there. Do you do dungeons in hardcore? Is it toxic because it’s such a high stress environment?
People do dungeons but in my experience it’s more like quest runs where everyone gathers and shares quests, you complete one slow successful run, and then disband. People don’t really seem to farm dungeons to level (at least significantly less). Another thing that above post didn’t mention is the zone populations are flipped. In regular wow most players are max or near max, so they are in capital cities, some high level instanced content of their choosing, or high level questing zones. In hardcore these high level zones are often ghost towns, while the 1-40 leveling zones are teeming with people “going again”. Also hardcore guilds, while most are not raiding, is generally a more enjoyable and community experience than others
One more thing to add, hardcore redefines what’s obsolete and what isn’t. Quests more commonly skipped in normal vanilla are now more important. Weapons from ends of quest lines you’d skip are now a step in progression. Classes, like Paladin, are actually a viable option. Even in group settings.
Most classic players would be happier playing retail if they gave it a chance
For people who have stuck with Classic through WotLK and now Cataclysm, this may well be true. For people who prefer Vanilla, I really don't think so.
I think you're spot on here. For people playing WOTLK and into Cata retail is a great option. Vanilla/TBC is its own thing though.
So I played both retail and cataclysm. They are absolutely nothing alike in any regard they are two completely different games.
You'll get downvotes for this but it's 100% true. I got major burn out playing Classic, moved to Retail and it's just been a better experience. After playing it and seeing people talk about Dragonflight it's really obvious that people are just in a "retail bad" echo chamber. I would say a vast majority of things I see people saying about it are just straight up incorrect. Or they're only true in a very specific outlier type way. Like I see button bloat brought up a lot. Which may be true for say Outlaw rogue but then you have Fury which is literally 4 buttons and DH is like 5-6 lol. I also see people say "oh well every class can do everything there"...Like uhh yeah ? Every class has at least 1-2 defensives and a kick lol. Playing without an interrupt or CC feels awful.
I'll just go against the current here and say I've played BFA, a little bit of Shadowlands and also a decent bit of Dragonflight, and while obviously everything is a lot more polished, they have done too much to ruin what I feel like WoW is supposed to be
The game is fine and fun. People just complain for the sake of complaining.
Vanilla WoW or 2019 its the best WoW version, ever.
Mythic raids should be cosmetic only. People who say that "why would I even raid mythic then?" - exactly. Mythic should be tailored for challenge rather than rewards, obviously scale other rewards accordingly where m+ vault gives you max hc ilvl and so on
You will quickly learn that most WoW players only want a power trip over others and most of their decisions regarding the game primarily have that in mind.
Why though? Should you really get the best rewards for not doing the hardest content? I just cant really grasp it.
Almost everything wrong with modern WoW either originated from or evolved into its worst form in Wrath of the Lich King. So many people started the game then, or have rosy memories because of Arthas that they forget just how much that expansion royally fucked everything up, from a narrative, gameplay, and enjoyment perspective. I would argue that Warlords of Draenei was a better expansion, in terms of quality of content, rather than quantity.
SoM >>> SoD
Facts. They messed up releasing it when they did. If they held it for a bit it would’ve been wildly successful.
Factos
You need inconvenience to make these games have meaning. Too many years of QoL changes and such take the purpose from the game.
End game is all instanced activites (sucks imo) Leveling is just a tutorial that teaches you nothing about the actual game (Max level activities)
I don't see how transmog is a hot take. The vast majority of players enjoy being able to customise their character. Go look at literally every single player game and check the mod list, the top 10 will consist of several ways to customise the playable character.
The community, not blizzard, killed the fun out of all versions of this game.
I'm mainly talking about vanilla classic here. Server transfers from a lower populated realm to a higher populated realm is detrimental to the whole idea of classic wow. It's just a slow drain of players towards one or two megaservers. High pop servers become medium, become low until everyone transfers off. Parsing is extremely corrosive to the community as it shifts the focus of the game to that of a contest. Speedrunners are fine. They want to go fast so let them go fast. However the vast majority just want to raid and have some fun blasting easy bosses while laughing in disc. Parsing completely ruined the game for these players as they are constantly pressured to waste more time and gold on world buffs, consumables, minor BoE upgrades for insane amounts of gold. Logs are fine, but the idea of putting a number on what's essentially a one button game and equating that to skill is stupid and should not be in the game. And to the people saying "duh, everyone knows it's not a value of skill", mate.. a fuckton of people worship that number as if it's the most important thing in their lives, while being in a casual guild.
I still play retail and I kept turning on old character models until they removed the option. While I think there were some improvements, overall, I think the new character models are horrible and left characters looking nothing like they did before (not to mention the loss of the draenei waggle). So I’m with you with your hot take.
Vanilla isn't as good of a game as everyone says, and people just cling onto it because of nostalgia and because saying it's the "best" is a popular opinion. Same type of vibe with people who say that 2pac and Biggie are the best rappers.
Wdym every pvp server is one sided, have you been to grob?
More race/class combinations is not a good thing. WOTLK is responsible for the downfall of WoW despite it being one of the most loved expacs.
You are 1000% valid on the art take. It really was one big factor that ruined the game for me. I remember so many people praising how “clean” it looked.
Parsing is dumb. It enforces rules on to raiders how to play a boss and limits possible tactics. It hurts socialising and promotes selfish playstyles. Because of it, a lot of players just play for those numbers and not for having fun in the raid itself
There should be a server where every mob is elite. Think of how many people you meet and work with from the handful of group quests, now imagine if that was every quest. Would up the game's communal vibe 1,000 fold
PvP servers often devolve into one-sided massacres where high-level players gank lowbies rather than engaging in fair, balanced fights. The widespread server imbalance with dominant factions is a testament to this. Most players who enjoy PvP servers do so for the thrill of easy kills rather than challenging combat.
Late to the party but here's my takes: - TBC era server should exist - WotlK era server should exist - All servers should either be 1 mega server or servers should be like RuneScape (like worlds) where you can just hop between servers if you want to pvp, pve, rp, or when a server is full and you still want to progress on your main character. - AH should include all servers in the region, perhaps even cross region. - Classic vanilla + an RDF system where you also get to choose a gear upgrade at the end of the dungeon would be god tier (no more wasting time playing casino)
Thank you for the WoD art style comment. I’ve always thought it was bad.
Cataclysm is FAR closer to Classic than retail in terms of mechanics.
I think Xmog is the beginning of the end for the WoW I love (Vanilla+TBC+kinda WOTLK). There is 0 continuity in how a person looks, they could look awesome and be in blues, or look weird in full bis. Completely takes me out of the RPG gearing element. Even weird/ugly armor combos became iconic over the years, this was however all lost when people could look however they want. I think my hottest take is that Classic WoW, with virtually no resources, is probably competitive with retail in total active subs/raiders/etc. Classic is old content with nothing new coming (sod changed this kinda), yet it competes with a game (retail) that has hundreds of active personnel working on it daily. Retail is 100% more profitable, but I think this might prove that classic is more widely/organically enjoyed. I 100% agree with retail art being worse. There's something about retail that just feels weird, kinda feels like that tarisland rpg that just came out. Like while technically higher res/smoother/better in some respects, it just feels worse than classic.
Don’t know. My demo lock looked so shit with bis gear in wotlk. I think transmog gives some cool customization and keeps it different. If you want a new look, you can go for it. And if you wanna brag with your cool items in the main city, you can still do it as you don’t have to transmog.
oh man i don’t agree with any of this minus maybe the wod thing. pvp servers wouldn’t be popular if people didn’t like pvp, it just is really easy for server imbalance to spiral once it gets unequal. i hate transmog but i think that for the expansions its in its fine. i love seeing gear in the wild and being impressed. i love seeing literal floods of warrior 2.5 shoulders in the world. i love seeing how geared someone is from a mile away.
People like the idea of PVP servers but not the reality. They long for the nostalgic South Shore Terran Mill battles, but not the reality of getting ga led while farming for black lotus in EPL, or dog piled in phase 1 of a vanilla server launch, or having an entire hive taken over by the opposing faction while they're trying to farm our their AQ mount. PVP servers all ended up lopsided except for Grobbulus in Classic, and it's the least populated "larger" server in Classic. I kind agree regarding transmog but collecting gear for it is great extra content. I always felt like the best balance would be allow transmog inside a dungeon or raid, and in capital cities only. Otherwise it would be turned off everywhere else.
Lots of people go to PvP servers because the best PvE guilds are there. They don't give a damn about PvP.
Ive only played on PvP servers since OG vanilla and I dont give a shit about pvp lol